


I Appear Missing

by mandalora



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Romance, High-to-Low Chaos Corvo Attano, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Time Skips, apparently that's not a tag? well it is now, as in: eventual post-D1, eventual low chaos, eventual plot??? eventual everything really, high chaos corvo has no rights, on immediate hiatus because suddenly I have a plot to figure out but i'LL BE BACK, the rights that he does not have include but aren't limited to: raising a child
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:34:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28832019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandalora/pseuds/mandalora
Summary: Corvo never found his daughter.
Relationships: Corvo Attano/Daud
Comments: 25
Kudos: 47





	I Appear Missing

_**1837** _

He doesn’t like the way these three look at him.

He doesn’t like the way anyone looks at him anymore, in all fairness, but these ones unnerve in particular.

He’s dealt with his fair share of jailers for whom prisoners were just punching bags for blowing off the pent-up inadequacies of their own home lives, but unabashed cruelty was easy to get used to. The terrifying ones were the brains among the brutes, the quiet shepherds, the false friends. For them it was a fun game to lure prisoners into illusions of niceties and empathy by offering a helping hand. Lead them out for an unscheduled walk in the yard, or a temporary transfer during cell cleaning, or an extra meal on a holiday—and then shatter the welcome change in routine with a surprise dose of pain and humiliation twice as intense as usual. And yet, those men were never really to blame when their little betrayals burned that much hotter with self-resentment and disappointment and guilt— _you moron, you gullible fool, you should have known better._

The air around the group that helped him escape is not quite the same. But there are similarities.

The black-eyed god comes to him, brands him like cattle, but he feels... better. Stronger. Like he could fix something, maybe. Like he wouldn’t be so easily tricked and caught off guard again. And yet he can’t help but resent the god for not giving him this magic sooner, for letting him be kept shackled and flogged and starved for six months, only providing aid after the breakout. For the fact that, if not for the self-proclaimed Loyalists, he might never have been saved at all.

They need him, that much is clear. And what they say isn’t really what they mean.

 _We know where Lady Emily is being held,_ they tell him. 

Months ago, perhaps he would have taken the bait. _Funny how you waited all this time to go after her, then,_ Corvo doesn’t say, and decides that these men don’t know shit.

He isn’t listening to them—doesn’t care enough to, or maybe he can’t quite hold his attention in place. And perhaps the words slip out of his mouth much too prematurely, but as he voices them it becomes clear that he couldn’t give less of a fuck. 

“I won’t be your hunting hound.”

Whatever he was saying to Pendleton, Martin brings to a pause. Havelock leans an inch forward over the table. “Pardon?” 

Corvo keeps his eyes fixed on the aged lacquered wood. “You heard me.”

“No, uh, I didn’t. Sorry. Could you repeat?”

His ribs hurt at the slightest movement. He may as well not breathe at all. “I will not,” he says louder, and looks up to meet Havelock’s heavy stare, “do your dirty work.”

They have the audacity to pretend to look _confused._

“I— I’m not quite sure we know what you mean,” Martin exchanges glances with the admiral and then pins Corvo with a quizzical gaze. “We only seek to—”

“To get me to bring you Emily, I’m aware.” Corvo leans back against the seat, but under the table his fingers rap, restless, next to the folded sword at his hip. “At the time most convenient for you, I’m sure. But I think I’ll pass.”

The words seem to offend Pendleton, and he narrows his eyes. “You misunderstand—” he says, but Havelock cuts him off with a raised hand.

“Corvo.” His tone of voice is tuned to patronizing placation and apart from being positively infuriating it serves as a confirmation. “We told you. We only want to place the rightful empress on the throne and clear your name, that’s all. In no capacity is this about us three. You can trust us.”

Unfortunate, then, that the concept of trust has been losing meaning as of late. With a brief jerk of his head Corvo clicks his tongue and sucks on his teeth, as if he’s a merchant and the bargain presented to him is not to satisfaction. He sits a moment longer, bouncing his leg and flicking his thumb against the tips of his other fingers, and then rises and turns to the door.

“Corvo. Think very carefully about what you’re doing here.”

“I did. Your offer’s declined.”

The walk to the exit feels long, aberrantly so. It takes effort to keep natural pace while he would rather run, disappear on the spot without so much as a trace.

Havelock calls after him again, now in warning, but Corvo ignores him. He’s almost there. Perhaps he’ll make it. Perhaps he’ll leave on his own terms for once. 

“Corvo!” Havelock barks then, jolting enough to warrant a flinch, as if he’s one of his sailors to command. “Stop.”

There’s a soft click.

Head first, then the body bit by bit, Corvo turns himself around to end up facing the barrel of Havelock’s pistol.

“Take a seat, Corvo.”

All eyes on him. Dead quiet, nobody moves. Pendleton’s servant stock-still behind the bar, Lydia frozen in the midst of a sweeping motion at the other end of the pub.

“Let us talk like civilized men. All of this is only in your best interest, don’t throw away this chance. You need us.”

Slow, subtle, Corvo moves his hand to the hilt of his sword at his hip. He feels tension in his face; it’s likely he’s sneering. “Do I really?”

Martin lets out a deep sigh, as if to move things along. “I’m sorry, Corvo,” he says, and pulls a pistol of his own. As if on cue Pendleton takes a step back, hands latched loosely on his belt, and nods to his servant. “But it’s best if you stayed with us.”

The servant follows Martin’s lead. Three guns trained on him now; two in front, one on the left. A door slams on the far side as Lydia takes the chance to scram.

Corvo stands still as stone and thinks, somehow, none of this really surprises him.

It’s angering, though.

He gives them no warning—a clench of a fist and he’s behind the bar. Someone shouts. Havelock springs up and fires just in time for Corvo to grab Pendleton’s servant by the back of his collar and belt and tug him into the bullet’s path. 

“Witch,” Martin yells over the rising noise, “he’s a damned witch!”

The body goes limp and heavy in his hands. Corvo lets it drop and dives behind the bar to ready his pistol. Wood chips fly off the counter’s inner edge with each new shot, going straight over his head. The force of impact blares in his ears and makes it difficult to distinguish separate sources of sound—but still Corvo makes out the drumming footfalls of someone breaking stance to flank him from the rear.

He remembers about his new sight from the Void, and the men’s positions are no longer hidden.

Watching them through the bar with the eyes of the Outsider, he waits for the split-second respite in which Havelock and Pendleton sync together between shots, and then bucks out of cover to break Martin’s dash with a bullet to the hip.

The man crashes to the ground, screaming, and from there it’s a walk in the park.

With Havelock, though, he had to work up a sweat. The tables weren’t bolted to the floor, as turned out when the bastard flipped one over to its side in the fray, trapping himself in a booth but behind solid cover and out of reach. Range proved useless; Corvo had to get in close when Havelock risked a moment to reload. Blood gushed from the meaty neck like from a stuck pig, splattered his clothes and hands.

Perhaps that’s why Samuel is looking at him funny.

“I need your boat,” Corvo rasps through heavy breaths. Gunpowder scrapes the walls of his throat. “Get out.”

Samuel looks—horrified, disappointed, insulted, or all of those at once. “No,” he says. “Corvo—”

He’s got no time for any of this. 

_Emily_ has got no time for any of this.

He’s out of rounds, but he shoves the barrel of his pistol in Samuel’s face all the same. “I’m not playing games, old man, get the fuck out!”

Samuel winces, clenches his jaw, raises his hands. He slowly climbs out of the skiff and Corvo lowers the gun only after stepping into it himself.

“Corvo.” Samuel sounds quiet and broken. “What have you done?”

Corvo takes off and doesn’t look back.

* * *

_Kent’s got a cough._

_How long?_

_Day four, now. Doesn’t seem to ease off._

_Well, that’s not good._

_No shit. Don’t know where he’s been, don’t know if it’s the plague, but._

_Better quarantine him just to be sure._

_Yeah._

_Does Daud know?_

_Fuck if I know. Haven’t seen him in two days, heard he went on some goose chase. Something about a slaughterhouse. No contracts or anything._

A snort. _Contracts? I’ve forgotten what those are._

_Oh, so has he, I’m sure. Where ever would he find the time, babysitting the Kaldwin offspring and all._

Unkind, sarcastic laughter. _Yeah. Speaking of. Anyone watching her while he’s out?_

_Don’t know, and honestly? Don’t care._

_They say he let Rothwild live. Is Daud getting soft?_

_Rothwild’s not coming back any time soon. You should spend more time thinking about your form._

_No, he’s right. The guy got shipped off in a crate or something. Billie told me herself._

_Sure she did. Sweetie, she doesn’t even know your name._

_Tsk—she told a guy, and he told a guy, and he told me. Says she was all weird about it too._

_Well, can’t blame her. Since when is Daud leaving loose ends?_

_You boys got no business yapping about this. More sweat, less talk. I hear another peep and I’ll have you both scrubbing floors for a week._

_Anyone check on Kent? How’s he doing?_

_Bad._

Kent attempts to kill himself in quarantine. It goes poorly. When the men find him bleeding and gurgling— _you fucking idiot, you know we’d get you fresh elixirs with Timsh’s coin_ —he tells them that he’s been chugging elixirs on the sly for two months now. That luck has never been on his side, that the effects of the cure must have worn off and this is the second wave—assuming that the first receded at all. That he’s sorry for keeping this from them.

He dies by choice, on his own terms. With dignity. His body is tossed in a dumping site all the same.

“Will I get the plague?” Emily asks. Flat, toneless, like she’s already resigned to the possibility.

Daud frowns. “What?”

“The guy that died, they say he was a carrier. They say we could all have it by now.”

Void curse their loose flapping tongues.

“No, kid, you won’t get the plague.”

“How do you know?”

Because he’ll die before he lets himself ruin this too. Because Corvo is now at large and he won’t let a plague, of all things, get in the way of returning Emily to her father and seeing the business with Delilah through to the end. Because he makes sure Emily takes a proper dose of elixir every day—Void knows his men don’t approve. Preferential treatment. Favoritism. She’s not even a Whaler. She’s not even supposed to be here.

He doesn’t care. He lets them talk. He hears it all.

“Because you’re young and healthy and strong and we’re taking preventative measures,” he says. “Don’t think nonsense. Go to bed.”

Emily gives a terse nod, but lingers.

“Any news of Corvo?” she asks, cautious yet demanding.

Daud rubs his temples. “I promise you, the second I hear something, you’ll be the first to know.”

Everything always piles up and then crashes down all at once. In the past several days he’s not had a chance to look for the escaped Lord Protector, but now that things are quiet after Timsh, with Billie and Thomas looking into new intel, he can afford an outing into the city. He’s certain Corvo will show at his doorstep sooner or later, he might as well try to meet the man on the way.

And he genuinely doesn’t care what Corvo will do to him, and what will come out of it all. As long as the man gets his daughter back. As long as at least this one thing is set right.

He sees or hears nothing of Corvo in the city, and when he returns, he curses himself for ever having left in the first place.

Billie doesn’t meet his eyes. She rises from her knee and just nods, jerky and stiff, and when she vanishes and flies over the rooftops in a puff of Void, Daud wishes he’d never met her.

* * *

Corvo has no idea where to go. After two weeks, that’s pretty damn clear.

First thing after he gets his bearings: he infiltrates the Office on Holger Square, hunts down Campbell and makes sure the man feels it as he dies. He takes care of witnesses as well.

Campbell had a journal on him. Coded. None of the three Overseers he captured alive seemed to know how to decipher, even with rats gnawing at their legs.

_“More rats. So many, now.”_

He flinches. Every time the Heart speaks he’s taken back, he remembers and relives, and he _aches._ It’s not her. It _is_ her. Her voice rends his innards to tatters and fills his ears like water, and he might be drowning but it feels so sweet. He carries this rubbery hunk of flesh like a stone around his neck, cradles it, talks to it.

_“Did you not want to free this city from pestilence and pain? Don’t you remember?”_

“It’s only a few rodents, Jess.” It’s justice. The means of it make no difference.

The Heart’s beat is usually steady, but now it’s soft and frail, a flap of a butterfly’s wings. So slight that he’s afraid the thing might shatter with too much pressure in his grip.

He has no idea where to go.

The Outsider tells him nothing. _Your road is only ever for you to choose,_ he says, and Corvo curses him to the bottomless ocean depths. 

He sleeps—in back alleys, on the roofs, in abandoned decrepit apartments. Anywhere a naked eye won’t readily see. The city’s walls are littered with wanted posters, and it’s his face that marks most. It’s his name that rings out of the loudspeakers.

_“Pushed out into the harsh world, hunted like a beast. A dangerous path to be forced on. My love, how wronged you were.”_

He holds her against his chest, curled up on his side on the floor of somebody’s ruined home, and listens. Eyes closed, breaths slow, he feels her heartbeat against his.

_“I wish I could have been there with you. In those broken months.”_

No, he thinks, anything but that. Don’t let her see him like that. Though, on second thought, he supposes that from her thin curtain realm between life and death she’s already seen it all.

Dawn, the very early cracklings of it. Through the window Corvo can see the tips of Dunwall Tower in the distance, and with a mix of longing and disdain he studies the armor that covers the familiar white walls. Crude metal plates of fortification. What would he find, if he went back there? What’s it like on the inside? Where is Emily sleeping? He hopes she’s able to sleep, it’s so early still.

_“Do you not think you were too hasty? That the men who lended you aid could have shone light on your trail?”_

No, he thinks in response, and refuses to entertain other possibilities. There is no point anyway, what’s done is done. They were liars. 

And the Heart knows it, too, and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

* * *

Everything keeps crumbling and falling apart.

Daud thinks, he should have killed her. He thinks, she had the fucking audacity to put her life in his hands, knowing he would most certainly let her walk. He thinks, his men will say he’s completely lost his grip.

He wonders if he could have killed her if it all had gone another way, if not for the empress—and laughs. He knows he could never.

The Whalers who remain are scarce. Vets, mostly, though some newer additions too. The hardy bunch—the alert, the self-reliant, the seasoned. Not the most amenable, in other words. Some younger folks got out unharmed, but overall they lost a good few. Daud was too late. Daud didn’t know.

He tells himself: Billie’s fault. All of it. 

But of course it isn’t. Of course he can’t sleep at night.

Emily is all right, at least. Smart kid, knew where to hide. At that, he feels indescribable relief.

The men talk, louder now, as if he can’t hear perfectly well. As if they couldn’t care less.

_Should gather a party and go after the bitch._

_Yeah. Never mind Hume—far as I’m concerned, Lurk may as well’ve shot up the whole place herself. And Daud did fuck all._

_Oh, don’t get me started on Daud. Old man’s out of it. And now he’s going—where, Coldridge? Where’s the money in that? Elixirs aren’t getting any cheaper._

_You know, if he didn’t fuck Burrows over and just handed the girl to the Pendletons as intended, we wouldn’t be here right now._

_Exactly. Six bleeding months and no use from her. Know what I think? We should ransom her out._

_Honestly, it’d be about fucking time._

When he gets back from the prison, Daud waits for everyone to trickle back to the base and gathers them up in the meeting hall. The plague, he tells them, is getting worse. Steady and quick. They’re setting up new schedules to send the corpse carts twice as often, to make room for new shipments from Coldridge. Don’t go through the dumping site, go around instead. Elixir prices are spiking, ration the reserves. Tynan will make a chart. Everyone needs to sign off and follow the rules. Remember to quarantine at first sign of symptoms, no exceptions. Don’t put friends and colleagues at risk. Don’t be like Kent.

The men nod and mutter among themselves. A couple dozen of them now, likely fewer. Pitiful numbers. He’s got enough to deal with without the plague so intent on thinning them out as well. 

Delilah isn’t going anywhere and Lizzy needs time to get her crew’s shit together, so Daud figures he can stay on base for a few days before proceeding with the work. Help salvage the masks and gold and ammo from the dead Overseers, burn the bodies. Set up some barricades. Wrap up with the cleanup, send people out on a couple tasks.

Keep an eye on a certain few.

Devon’s been standing in the back of the crowd, smoking. Big, strong guy, and surprisingly light on his feet. Used to be one of Slackjaw’s back in the day, but thought himself too good for the work. Daud agreed. Slackjaw holds a grudge to this day for whisking away one of his best.

Daud and Devon never did manage to properly get along in the near decade the man’s been here, but he does good work, and usually that’s enough. 

Not now.

Meeting adjourned: as the men file out of the hall, Devon drops his finished cigarette right on the floor and grinds it out with his boot heel.

Before he can turn to leave, Daud calls out to him. “A word.”

Hands stuffed in pockets, eyebrow raised, Devon stays. So does Finn. Buddies, these two, and Finn’s got balls, but Daud doesn’t send him away—in fact, it’s convenient he’s here. The lad doesn’t talk much, barely says anything outright, but in hushed tones he’s the heart and soul of gossip. A sharp, dangerous tongue.

“Devon, I understand you’ve appointed yourself to keeping something of an order whenever I’m away lately,” Daud says. “And I can appreciate that. However.”

Devon narrows his eyes.

“What I don’t appreciate is you shoving your nose where it doesn’t belong. And the heiress,” he pauses to punctuate the word, “does not, in any capacity whatsoever, concern you. So if I hear another peep about her, or if I see you—or anybody from your clique—come near her for any reason, you’ll be well on your way to making intimate friends with the weepers in the sewers. Am I clear?”

Stone-faced, Devon looks him dead in the eye and holds out a pause. “Crystal.”

“Glad to hear it.” Daud reaches into his pocket to fish out a cigarette. The silence weighs on the air as he, in no hurry, lights it and takes two generous drags. “And if there’s anything you gotta say,” he snaps his eyes to Finn, smoke trickling out of his mouth, “you say it to my face. Come by my office, my doors are always open. We’ll talk it out.”

A muscle flexes in Finn’s jaw.

Devon flicks his eyebrows up and scratches at his cheekbone, beside the ear. “Like you talked it out with Lurk, sir?”

The breath Daud pulls in is leaden.

Dismissed, they take their leave, and as he watches them go he genuinely, foolishly hopes that this won’t become a problem.

Campbell is dead, he hears, and doesn’t need to guess by whose hand. The colorful descriptions of the crime scene at Holger Square confirm the assumption. He sends a couple people into the area to scout for signs of the Lord Protector and report back with the latest known location.

They’re gone for one day. Two days. Three. They don’t come back.

* * *

Two of Daud’s assassins find him.

He spots them too, early enough to snipe one from the roof’s edge with a well-placed bolt before the second can give warning. The second Corvo makes an effort to be more careful with.

It’s a tough fight—always is when he’s not aiming to kill, but this is a brutal opponent. Corvo earns a few gashes of his own before finally managing to knock the assassin off balance, at which point he shoves him down to the roof’s surface and wrenches the sword into the back of his knee. The man thrashes, tries to throw him off; Corvo wrestles him into place and twists both his ankles. A moment’s thought brings to mind the poison pricks he’s learned of in Campbell’s interrogation room: he rips away the heavy whaling gloves, throws them down to street level, and then hauls the assassin to his temporary hideout nearby. 

Without the respirator mask, the man looks younger than him, but not by much; maybe five, seven years. Corvo doesn’t ask. He only wants to know where Daud’s lair is.

And it’s a long night.

Rats, as he’s already found, are difficult to control. Too erratic, too _quick._ Instead, a knife in the hand is true—but more personal, as well. Intimate. With every passing hour, bile crawls higher up his own throat. With every strip of flesh he takes, his own body cries out louder in phantom throes. 

He wonders what gains such loyalty. What would this man lose if he simply told him what he wanted to know? Family? Unlikely, he doubts these assassins have ever known anything of the sort.

Though, really, he’s not one to judge. _He_ never told them shit. He supposes he understands.

It’s clear the man is well-trained to resist interrogation. He hardly speaks, and at first he doesn’t scream, either, but his will eventually breaks and cedes to pain. And yet he says nothing of worth. Only spits blood and curses. 

It drags on for way too long. When Corvo finally lets the rats take the man’s bones, he shakes and retches and blames it all on the delirium from his untreated wounds.

Sokolov’s elixir helps. He dresses his cuts as best he can with the limited supplies he’s stolen from a physician’s office and prays to the Outsider that they don’t fester. He realizes he’s starving, so he drinks stale beer for lack of water and tries to eat cold eel from a tin, but can’t keep it down. Crying and in pain, he falls asleep to the rustles of the few rats that stayed to gnaw on the remaining bloody chunks in the corner, and keep him company while they’re at it.

He sleeps all through the next day—or at least tries to, drenching himself in sweat all throughout the many nightmares and jerky awakenings—and in the evening tells himself: slow down. Stop. Think. 

Though that’s nearly impossible.

Perhaps he’s burning up; he can’t really tell, but his mind races and pulses as though with a fever. Burrows. Daud. Emily. Daud took Emily but it’s highly doubtful he’s holding her; Burrows wouldn’t tangle with men he hires to do his dirty work any more than he has to. He needs to keep Emily close. He’d keep her hidden, and within reach. They said so, in Coldridge, when there was no more use in pretense and instead only joy in gloating.

But they didn’t say where. Not in Dunwall Tower, though—half the city wouldn’t think Emily dead if she were there. And the Tower is off limits anyway. Too fortified. Too protected and watched. Burrows too untouchable, his supporters stalwart and hidden. There’s no hope in returning Emily to the throne with the current organization of court. Court is a tangled clump of yarn, sticky strings of a web so messy it seems impossible to find which one to pull in order to begin to unravel.

He consults the Heart but it leaves him feeling bitter and cross.

_“You want me to point the way. Help you onto a path. No.”_

“It’s your own fucking daughter, Jess. Help me. Help _her._ Tell me what you see.”

But when she speaks again, her voice sounds distant. So... lost. 

_“Do I know this place? Have I wisdom to convey? I only know that I am weary. Nothing more.”_

Corvo sits still, holding her, and stares into nothing. 

And he understands. He figures he feels the same. Floating in an ocean of naught, numb and lost and confused, aching for a touch of clarity and rest. The city far down at his feet, right in the palm of his hand and yet so tiny that he’s both deep in the center of it and nowhere at all.

He only knows that he misses his daughter like mad, and that she’s all he has left. That he will do anything to get her back, see her smile again, take her into his arms and stroke her hair and hold her close.

And she’s out there. She lives. Day after day he tells himself so.

He has to start somewhere. So he gathers up and he goes to Parliament, sneaks inside and settles in to wait. Night falls, the offices clear out, and Corvo gets to work on cracking open filing cabinet locks and rummaging in desks and drawers. He finds no information directly pertinent to his circumstance, but he does get his hands on a couple of lists of some of the members’ personal data. No reason to wait—he takes special note of those parliamentarians in the vicinity whose addresses he has on hand, and it’s already sunrise when he climbs through the windows into their clean lavish estates.

No note of Emily, not yet; but when he sees a framed portrait of Burrows in one of the home offices he surveys, he seeks out and stabs its owner clean through the chest without a second thought. 

A familiar face, a cabinet minister he’s seen on occasion at Tower meetings. The realization is fleeting in his mind, and he doesn’t feel much of anything beyond muted curiosity of recognition.

Corvo finds no information on his daughter’s whereabouts in this office. He does, however, find lists of mailing addresses of members of this man’s ministry. 

And at first, he seeks out justifications for the deaths he brings. This one is loyal to Burrows. This one helps fund Sokolov’s work. This one worshipped Campbell. This one planned to cash in on the Lord Protector’s execution and made arrangements for an after-party.

This one still mourns the late empress—but not hard enough. This one _says_ he’s worried about the young heiress and wishes someone would bring her home to the Tower, but does nothing about it himself. This one seems to hold no correlation to the Kaldwin line whatsoever—suspicious, with how high on the ladder she is. This one—

_“His parents taught him to humiliate the servants, but he put a stop to that. And all the other cruel things they taught him.”_

It doesn’t matter. Snakes, all of them, down to the last—always have been and always will be.

Soon, he stops trying to find justifications altogether.

* * *

Shadows draw over Dunwall. The poor die from the plague. The rich... The rich get put down like dogs.

Daud hears the news; panic about the plague of their own spreads quickly throughout the upper class. The escaped Royal Protector, they say. Witch, they call him; the Outsider’s agent. They’ve seen him. He flies on the wings of night. Doesn’t even bother to hide his face. Not that he needs to—the Watch can’t catch him, and if they try, the rats feast.

Technically, Corvo has every right. Technically, Daud can understand. And yet he looks at those worn dead eyes in the papers and posters, hears that name in announcements, and all the thought that runs through his mind is _madman._

It takes a mere few days and a couple dozen butchered parliamentarians worthy of report for the price on Corvo’s head to triple.

Observations gain traction, and turn into complaints. _Daud, that’s our bread and butter he’s fucking with. Daud, when that freak’s done there won’t be anyone left to snip. Daud, he’s a loose end. Daud, that’s a fortune just gallivanting around in the open. Daud, just think how much elixir we’ll get with all that coin. Daud, let us at him. Daud, you know he’ll be coming for us next, right? Daud, what the fuck are we waiting for? Daud?_

“I said, no,” he snaps, and rubs his eyes as the clamor at last begins to die down. His head feels ready to burst; hot spikes of pain pulsate behind his sockets and temples. Everyone’s crowding around his desk and he can’t catch a damned breath.

Thomas’s voice is steel slashing the air. “Master’s word is final.”

“Explain.” Javier leans into Thomas’s space, and were he a wolfhound he might have snapped his jaws. “Give one good fucking reason.”

“Attano’s dangerous,” someone says from the back.

Someone else replies, “Nah, he’s just unhinged.”

“You’d think Marco and Nic could handle a lunatic no problem, and where’re they now?”

“He just needs to be properly cornered. He’s Marked; obviously you’d need more than two people for the job.”

“Or, you know, Daud could help.”

“No one,” Daud growls over the newly rising noise, “is going anywhere. No one is _cornering_ anyone. Everyone stays fucking put.”

_“Why?”_

“Because I said so, that’s why,” he barks, and, as one, those standing too close flinch back a hair. “This isn’t a bloody collective decision.” 

None of it is, and never was, but the men are getting ballsy. They’re restless, Thomas saw it necessary to inform him earlier in private. Nervous. Angry.

Understandable, probably. But they’re just going to have to suck it all right up.

Corvo carving up the nobility, frankly, doesn’t help. What does he expect to accomplish? Parliament is a vipers’ nest, of course it is; but barring Pendletons, very few of them—if any at all—had a hand in directing the fate of the late empress. And most of them have it coming for one thing or another anyway, Daud is sure of it; but damn it, this isn’t exactly the best time to be tossing corpses into the streets.

In fact, hunting the man down and putting a stop to it all before it gets out of hand does indeed seem like a sound consideration. But this man is Corvo Attano, and for Daud, this complicates things.

“It’s almost like you’re waiting for him to come to us,” Devon gives voice. He doesn’t usually speak up at large meetings, and all of Daud’s attention latches on to him like a magnet. So does the rest of the group’s. “Which, now that our location’s exposed, I don’t doubt he’ll do after he’s had his fun with the blue-bloods, but…”

He dips into a pause, as if to give the men a chance to express their indignation in whatever subtle way they seem fit—which they do.

“What’s this about, Daud? The Kaldwin girl? She was never intended as leverage, was she? Or—wait, were you planning on ransoming her out to _Attano?_ Because, as it stands, he doesn’t seem to be in much of a negotiating mood.” A few hums and nods from his buddies, but otherwise the group is silent. “So that’s pretty much a dead end. Which leaves us with no contract work, hardly enough elixir to last us just a little over a month— Am I getting that right, Tynan—? And then a living, breathing ninety grand tearing around the city, not to mention a whole other royal sack of coin wandering all over this base right now. Way I see it, the options here are pretty clear.”

Sometimes, Daud genuinely wonders where these people have been over the past six months. It’s not about the money, hasn’t been for half a year now—at least, not for him. At this point, there’s little he can tell them.

And these men are resourceful. They’re all big boys. They don’t need his permission to lie and steal and, yes, kill whomever they themselves deem necessary for the sake of survival, like most everybody here has done for all of their sorry lives. He’s not their nanny. He’s not their father. But as long as they choose to stick around he _is_ their boss, meaning there are lines he can draw that they can’t cross. The former Lord Protector and the princess are one such line.

He’s made it perfectly clear over the years that those who have an issue with his authority are more than welcome to walk right out.

And Devon knows this full well. Daud holds eye contact as he drags out a deliberate pause. “Is there a problem, Ellis?”

Devon’s eyebrows flick up, a clear substitute for a scoff. “I don’t know, Daud. Is there?”

It’s a rare kind of silence that lets one hear the wind creaking in the broken roof beams overhead.

“This subject is closed,” Daud says to no one in particular. “I already said that the Lord Protector is none of our concern, and that’s where the discussion ends. If anyone else has woes they’d like to get off their chest, like mister Ellis here, I invite them to do so now. Otherwise, feel free to go.”

Not like they need permission to leave, he never called them up here in the first place. The room clears in a minute; Thomas stays. So does Devon. Smart man.

“Devon,” Daud leans forward and props his elbows on the desk. “You’re a valuable asset—and you know this, which is why, I suspect, you’ve decided that you’re free to step this far out of line. But you may be forgetting that everyone here is equally expendable. And I won’t be giving you any other warnings, I can promise you that right now.”

Daud doesn’t remember what the man replied, if he did at all. He does remember the cruel ice in his eyes, and can’t get it out of mind it as he makes his way through the Distillery District. Emily is dead silent as she clings to his back—be it for fear of heights or because she took to heart his earlier prohibition of chatter, lest she risk breaking his concentration in smuggling a missing princess halfway across the city. He tries to avoid the alleys he knows for sure are riddled with weepers so as not to scare the girl more than she already is, but, in truth, none of the streets weaving around John Clavering are very pleasant in their own right.

He leaves Emily to wait on the roof of the Captain’s Chair hotel while he surveys the Golden Cat’s renovated interior and steals the necessary keys (the locks were also changed during the cleaning), and then brings her to one of the unoccupied rooms upstairs. She’s appropriately indignant, but agrees to hold him to his swift return.

Prudence is shocked to see him; her face pales so much her makeup begins to resemble that of a clown.

“I don’t have her,” she nearly chokes on her breath, backing away into her desk and holding out a shaking hand, palm forward. “Please, I swear. The Pendletons never brought her here, they never told me anything, I don’t know where she is, I—”

“She’s here,” Daud tells her, and her face seems to no longer know which expression to make. “Top floor, second room from the end of the hall. She will stay here for a couple of days. You will feed her. You will not ask questions. You will not tell a soul about her, or any of this at all.”

Prudence gulps at the air like a fish on land.

“Because if you do, I will know, and you will die. And the Pendletons won’t protect you.”

Assuming, of course, that they aren’t rat feed by now.

Her voice shudders. “They just might,” she hisses, “we just reopened—”

“It’s no trouble to find a new madame. I’m sure any one of your girls would love to take your place.”

He leaves her groping the decanter on her desk, and heads back upstairs to check on Emily. Of course, a brothel is no place for a young girl, but neither is the Flooded District. Especially now—Void knows what some of his people have got on their minds. Lizzy sent word with arrangements of taking him to Brigmore, and Daud doesn’t fancy the idea of returning from the job to find the girl exchanged for coin.

And, in truth, he can think of no place fit to hide her. At least the Golden Cat is dry, and with a proper roof overhead. Besides, the funds for a full cleaning due to the infestation were generous. Unthinkable as it may be, save for the homes of the aristocracy, for a _very_ short time this might in fact be the most sanitary establishment on this side of the Wrenhaven. For a couple of days, it’ll do. 

_“Now_ will you tell me what’s going on?!” Emily demands as he enters the room and closes the door. “Why are we here? I might get the plague now!”

“You won’t,” Daud says, “if you don’t leave this room.”

Emily frowns, wraps her arms around herself, but listens as he explains to her as much as he reasonably can. He tells her he has business to attend to and must leave for a couple of days; makes something up about a trace of possible infestation they found on Commerce Street; says that it isn’t safe for her to be anywhere near there while the men investigate and decontaminate. He assures her that he’ll check on her later tonight and will return to take her back to base as soon as he possibly can.

That is, if he survives Delilah, he doesn’t say—but he sure as all bloody Void doesn’t plan on dying.

Still, if worst come to worst, if he never returns... The nobles would get word of Emily cooped up here, and from there it would be up to Corvo to stay on his toes and get to her first.

The thought dries his throat, and he swallows. Wouldn’t this be best, in truth? He could leave Emily here and Corvo would find her quicker than otherwise. Emily would tell him about the hideout. Corvo’s revenge would come sooner, rather than later.

Daud knows he deserves to, but of course he doesn’t want to die. He wants justice for the royal family. He wants a Kaldwin back on the throne. He wants Emily to take all the atrocities she’s seen in the past six months and turn them into positive change for this city, and he wants her Royal Protector to help guide her there.

It seems her Royal Protector, however, is too busy driving Parliament through a meat grinder.

It’s an uncomfortable little detail, to say the least. Who is Corvo killing? Is he making conscious decisions? Is he picking and choosing, weeding out the most corrupt and self-serving? Does he know them that well to be able to pass judgment? He shouldn’t, by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. Is he sucking them all into one funnel with no regard for the consequences? The thoughts scream hypocrisy, but Daud believes that he’s learned his lesson of consequence of reckless negligence. What’s done is done—Burrows, wretched swine that he is, is better than no regent; Parliament, rotten as it is, is better than no legislature, and without the latter the former can’t, frankly, do shit. What is going through Corvo’s mind? Who, does he suppose, will replace all those people he’s so eagerly sending to the Void?

Does he even have a clue?

Daud would like nothing more than to believe that Corvo knows what he’s doing, but it’s debatable how much rational agency can be ascribed to actions of a man tortured and broken and stripped of normal life. Roped into the black-eyed bastard’s games, at that. They all played their parts, and now it’s a matter of either slowing down the rot’s advance on this city, or otherwise helping it along. It seems the choice has been made.

“But where are you going?” Emily asks as Daud turns to leave. “Will you be looking for Corvo?”

Hand on the doorknob, Daud freezes.

“He’s out there, I know,” she says. “I heard them talking about it. He must be looking for me too.”

Daud lowers his head. His voice is dry. “What else have you heard?”

It’s silent for a long moment, and Emily’s own voice is harder and colder when she finally speaks. “He’s looking for me. Right?”

Daud finds himself incredibly glad that she chose not to answer.

“Yeah,” he mutters, trailing his eyes through the paths in the door’s wood grain.

“You’ll find him, won’t you?”

Before he can speak, he clears his throat. “Yes,” he says, but it comes out traitorously weak. “Of course.”

He bids her goodbye and hurries to leave.

Next morning: more dead. Tallboys in the streets, nobles in their homes. The barricades are no longer of any real help; rats accept the invitation into the once-cleanest and safest sectors of the Estate and Legal Districts, and, try as they might, the press can’t sugarcoat or hide the decline of the gentry. Those with enough sense in their heads flee the city, others can’t bear to part with their property and pay for it dearly.

Daud stands on the roof, smoking, and imagines Billie at his side. She’d click her tongue, let out a brusque and dry scoff. _Well, shit,_ she’d say.

He desperately hopes she ran as far as she could.

He gathers up his gadgets, ammunition of various types, and whatever elixir they can spare for any one person on any given day. Thomas is all suited up; Montgomery offered to help with legwork as pertaining to Wakefield, said she feels sympathetic to Lizzy’s predicament. Whatever her actual reasons, it’s a nice sentiment. When she shows up, and they’re just about ready to set out, the office doors fly open with a gratuitous slam.

“Going out again?”

With one foot outside, Daud halts, and the air whizzes out of him in a weary sigh. Thomas and Montgomery turn around to look; Daud doesn’t bother.

“I don’t have time for this, Devon.”

“Make time.”

It’s the brazen abruptness of the words that makes Daud turn to face the man after all. Finn is with him, naturally—and also Javier, Dimitri, and two others with their masks on. 

Cowards. “Boys, I’d love to chat, really, but I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a hurry.”

“So you are.” Devon puts out his cigarette on the door frame, then saunters into the center of the room, hands in pockets. Javier and Finn exchange glances, then split apart and take positions at the opposite sides of the perimeter. The rest stay back. “Mind me asking where?”

“Finn,” Montgomery cuts in, low and cold. “Don’t. It’s not worth it.”

Finn looks back across the space, eyes hard, and gives no other indication of acknowledgment.

“Nah,” Javier fills in for him. “It kind of is.”

A novice appears in the doorway, but Dimitri halts him with an outstretched arm blocking the path. Daud sighs. “Cut the small talk. What’s this about, Devon, Attano? Really?”

“Attano,” Devon nods. “And the princess.” He stalks forward as he speaks. “And the Overseers. And Lurk. And your moronic novel ideals.” 

Thomas’s hand moves to the hilt of his sword. “Stand down, Ellis.”

“Now, now.” Daud lays a hand on Thomas’s shoulder and steps forward. “It’s all right. The man’s got something on his mind, let him speak.”

“You’re well aware of what I have to say about you. I didn’t come here to talk.”

“Then get to the point.”

“I’m here to tell you to step down.”

“Mm. Are you, now?” Several pairs of tense eyes on him. “My answer is no. Are we done?” 

Devon shrugs, all casual concession. “This can go cleanly and quietly. Or not. Personally, I don’t mind either way.”

A shame. A damn shame, that’s what it is.

A chuckle twists Daud’s lips into an unkind smirk. “You don’t want to fight me, boy.”

A glint of gusto in Devon’s eyes. No doubt he’s missed the brawls with fellow Bottle Street lads back in the day. Well—this is no Bottle Street, and someone’s about to get awfully disappointed. 

“I will if I have to,” says Devon. _Fuck, yes, I do,_ says his loose yet agile stance, and something about it makes a spark of offense go off in the back of Daud’s head.

Who the fuck does this runt think he is?

If anyone has the right to attempt to take him down, anyone at all, then it’s Billie, and she botched her chance.

Who the _fuck does he think he is?_

“Careful,” he says, “not to bite off more than you can chew.”

“Oh, I’ve weighed my chances.”

“Did you really? Might want to double-check.”

“Daud,” Devon pulls out his blade, smooth and negligent, “I’m going to kill you. If that’s what it takes. If that’s all you can acknowledge. And if I don’t,” he nods at his entourage, “then one of them will.” 

Such high opinions of his colleagues. It’s almost admirable. 

“You’re out of it,” Devon goes on. “You’re dragging us into the dirt and you know it. Say what you will, but Lurk was on to something there.”

Daud can’t hold it back, he sneers. “Lurk is twice what you’ll ever be; don’t embarrass yourself.”

“She didn’t have the balls to take you on.”

“And for good reason.”

“I’d like to be the judge of that.”

Muttering fills the room; Daud notices just now that more people have shown up, looking in from the outside and from above and from the doorway on the other side of the office.

“Sir,” Thomas hisses behind him, “we’ve got no time for this. Please, reconsider.”

“Don’t worry,” Daud replies under his breath. “This’ll go quick.” He sighs as he fixes the fit of his gloves, then draws his sword, and raises his voice: “Clear the floor.”

The men do as they’re told. Devon takes a couple of steps back as if in invitation to share the space; then rolls his neck, squares his shoulders, and starts in a slow, measured, vigilant pace from side to side.

With mirroring movements, Daud joins in. Breaking in his footing, feeling out the flex of the playing field. “I’ll give you one last chance, Devon. Stand down. Walk away. I’d rather not have to hurt you.”

“Nah.” He didn’t expect the man to back down, but the reply makes his blood boil regardless. “Do your worst.”

That almost earns him a scoff: _You don’t want me to do my worst._ But—well. Some people simply don’t get a chance to learn humility early on.

“Your father didn’t whup you enough, is that it?” he says, and a rolling laugh spills out of Devon’s throat.

“No,” he breathes, then clicks his tongue and adjusts the grip on his sword. “No, he did not.”

With little warning, he blinks to attack, and the laughing falls to the Outsider in Daud’s head.

The fight is longer than intended. Devon is good, one of the best fighters Daud’s worked with, and perhaps he’s plain capable of holding his own. Perhaps Daud really is growing weak. Perhaps they’re both caught up in the thrill of violent conflict after months of dormancy. Perhaps they’re dragging it out for the audience. 

Daud doesn’t bend time; he restricts his use of magic only to that which Devon has access to. The fight would be long over otherwise, so laughably imbalanced. It would be so easy to establish once and for all that he holds more power than any of these runts could ever dream of. Show them all that no one to possibly replace him stands even close to what he can do. Obliterate them. Leave them in the dust. Show them all their fucking place.

Billie was smart not to fight him.

Beating Devon with mere transversals and tetherings and honest swordwork would serve humiliation of the highest order, but Daud is taking his time until then. Even better—they hardly call on the Void at all. It’s all swings and clashes and flicker of blades; it’s a brawl for release of pent-up anger and bitter hurt and grief, oh, the _grief_ for the men they could have been and the things they could have done and the rotten city that they pushed over the edge—

 _He_ pushed. Just him.

It’s when blood roars in his ears and pulse threatens to leap out of his throat, that Daud strikes to disarm, flings Devon’s sword away, and knocks him to the ground.

Shouting and chanting, all around: a racket of relief and anger and plain old agitation, but Daud doesn’t make out even a word.

“You fucking dare,” he rasps in lowered tone, holding Devon at sword point. “You really thought you had what it takes. You really thought you could lead my men. I built this. This is my charge. This is my curse. I’ll drag it into the grave if I have to, and you’re deluded if you think you get to make claim to even a piece of it.”

Pulling his lips back in a grimace, Devon holds on to his injured side and looks Daud in the eye. “Your men,” he scoffs. “You don’t know shit about what’s best for your men, you stuck-up, self-centered—”

His head jerks to the side when Daud backhands him across the face. Devon’s grunt is an indulgent formality; he takes generous time to shift his jaw into its proper position and then spits on the floor, aiming for the other’s boots and only narrowly missing. 

“Come on,” Devon grins up at him. “Hit me again. You know I’m right and you hate it. You hate me so much for being right, so go ahead, hit me again.” He clicks his tongue, and then runs it over the top row of his teeth. “It’s the next best thing—look at you. You can’t even fucking kill me. What in the bloody Void happened to you, Daud?”

Daud takes note of the grave quiet around them when it begins to ring in his ears like the shrillest of the City Watch alarms. Not a sound, not a trace of movement in his periphery—though there might just be the entirety of the remaining Whalers gathered here with how stripped and exposed he feels.

He knows what he has to do. He knows what everyone here is expecting of him.

By the Outsider, how he doesn’t want to. 

“You got what you came here for,” he quietly says. “You showed everyone how big of a man you are, congratulations. I’m giving you a chance to leave the district.”

Devon laughs, raucous and hoarse and ear-shredding.

“Fuck you,” he spits. “Billie should’ve finished what she s—”

The words gurgle to a stop when metal pierces his windpipe. Daud lets the image sink in for a moment before wrenching the sword back out, and like a final insult from beyond the grave, blood splatters his boots.

The body falls. Daud closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

It’s been a while since he last had to put down one of his own.

Everyone is staring when he trades reverie back for reality, and he has to resist the urge to let his sword clatter to the ground. Instead, he grits his teeth, and gulps another chestful of air.

“Anyone else?!” Though many pairs of eyes are locked onto him, not everyone opts to look straight on. “Anyone else got something to say? Anyone else wants to pick up their weapon?” 

That’s it. The end.

“No? No one?”

This is the end of them. 

It’s been a long time coming, probably. 

“Otherwise, if you’ve got a problem with me, if you’re not satisfied with something—you can either suck it up, or get the fuck out of my sight and pray to your whore mother that I never catch wind of you again.”

There is no room, no time in his life left for traitors. He will not put up with any more, and if that leaves him with nothing—well. It’s what he deserves. 

“Stay or go, you get this very second to decide and I won’t ask twice.”

At last, someone comes alive and starts moving. Someone gets out of sight by mere transversal through the back entrance or the roof; someone takes the doors; some stay standing and mutter and throw dirty looks—at one other, at Daud, at Devon’s body.

Daud doesn’t wait for the room to clear entirely, doesn’t wait to see everyone’s final decision. Perhaps he doesn’t care, perhaps he would rather not know. He slides a cursory glance over the bloody mess in the center of the floor, turns, and blinks outside.

Thomas catches up to him. Daud genuinely can’t think of what in the world he did to earn this man’s loyalty. 

They don’t speak, not until they get all the way to the Riverfront, at which point they stop on a roof overlooking where the _Undine_ is docked and Daud says, “You don’t need to come with me.”

Thomas doesn’t move a muscle.

“This isn’t your fight.”

“Sir,” exasperation whizzes through the filters of Thomas’s mask, “I said I’ll help you see this through to the end, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

“What, even after everything?”

“Even after everything.”

“Well.” A stuck sigh tries to block his throat. “Make the most of it, then. After this job, I figure this is the end.”

“I think the men would agree that you made that pretty clear.”

Daud risks a sidelong look at him. “And you? Got anything to say?”

Thomas only rolls a shoulder. “In all honesty? Can’t say I’m surprised.”

Daud looses a mirthless scoff, and nods.

“When we’re done here,” he says after a stretch of silence, “I want you to leave the city. Plague’s not doing us any favors. Corvo will reach the hideout eventually. Don’t be there when he does.”

“Sir, I’m not going anywhere and you know it.”

“That was an order.”

“I respectfully refuse.”

“I’m going to leave,” Daud raises his voice slightly to cut off whatever Thomas was about to say next. “You won’t see much of me after this. I’m not coming back, not for long.”

Then Devon died in vain. Why did he kill him, if he’s running? What point was he trying to make, if he no longer intends to uphold it?

 _Good riddance,_ Billie would say. _No one’ll miss him._

Would she, though? Past events have shown that she would have agreed with everything that man had to say.

“This city is dying, Thomas. No use in going into the ground with it.” 

Thomas is silent and still as he appears to digest the predicament. Arms crossed, facing the Wrenhaven as if looking to it for answers and guidance when there’s none to be found on land.

“What about Lady Emily?” he suddenly asks. “Where is she?”

Daud pulls in a long breath. “Somewhere safe.”

“Is she?”

No, of course not. Nowhere is safe anymore in this shithole. “She’s no longer a concern. Corvo will find her, and when he does—” Thomas snaps his head to the side to look at him. Daud cringes. “—he’ll know where we’re based, yes. But everyone will be long gone by then. You’ll make sure of it.”

A beat. Another. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“Of course.”

“Those are some damn hasty decisions.”

Daud purses his lips. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“Is it?” The mask fails to hide the tension in the voice. “Never mind us, we’ll manage, but the girl? She’s just a kid. An innocent kid. And you’re handing her over to a butcher?” 

Thomas tries to keep his words level, like usual, but they feel like a slap all the same. “I’d say she’s well-accustomed to living with killers by now,” Daud mutters.

“Not like that.” Thomas shakes his head. “I saw the carnage, Daud. I saw what he does. _How_ he does it. It’s not a statement, it’s not fear tactics, it’s… There’s no purpose to it. It’s slaughter for slaughter’s sake. It’s not exactly a mark of a sane man.”

Funny how things turn out, all the strings of causality. Perhaps Corvo always had a taste for blood, and the death of his empress broke the barriers containing it—or it simply broke _him._ Or perhaps Coldridge did. And who put him there? Who gave the Outsider reason to Mark him?

They all make their choices.

“He’s family,” he says after all; a worthless, weak last resort.

“Sometimes, family isn’t what’s best. You know that.”

Daud doesn’t care to consider Thomas’s implications. But they slip under his skull, curl into a spot in the depths of his mind. He opts to ignore it, as if he could ever run from his thoughts.

* * *

What he sees are not the people he kills. 

Not entirely. Not always. Usually, as he kills them, he sees Burrows. He sees Campbell—even now. He sees Daud. The Royal Executioner and his hound, the men in respirator masks, the dozen of nameless jailers who enjoyed their service at Coldridge more than they should have. The jailers are dead now, he made sure of it, but he sees them still. They’re dead but they never left. 

These are the faces he sees as he cracks open chests and tears throats and crushes heads; breaks bones against solid objects with the frightening force of wind, walks in their skin, runs with the rats. It’s so easy. So freeing how most of them can’t even hope to fight back, so simple to rid someone of life, and he can’t fathom how he managed to get himself locked up in the first place. How he allowed men of such weakness to call the shots in his life and drive his fate.

He can’t fathom the fact that he let them kill her.

How? They couldn’t have. He was there, she couldn’t have died on his watch—unless he remembers it all wrong. It isn’t the first time he thinks this. He still sees it at night, the same scene that kept him awake in his cell: staring at the confession document and wondering with utmost sobriety if his mind was playing tricks. If perhaps the false accusation was a veil of suppression, a self-imposed lie. If perhaps he deserved to burn in that chair.

He stares at the body lying at his feet, and almost sees Jessamine instead.

The Heart is quiet, of late. He hardly even feels its beat most of the time, but he takes it out now and it’s unpleasantly cold in his hand.

“Did I kill you?”

Silence, for a painfully long time. The question swirls and spins, over and over until the words stop making sense in his head.

The voice is so hoarse, so _tormented_ when the Heart finally speaks, that he hardly recognizes it.

 _“Did... you kill the empress?”_ It’s a chilling mixture of exhaustion and disbelief. _“No, the empress did not die by your hand.”_

Corvo isn’t sure if the answer brings him the relief he knows he should be feeling.

 _“But it pains me nearly as much that you’re even entertaining the thought. No, you did not kill her, but you—”_ More silence, and the light in the little window dims for a moment, as if in a blink. Corvo pictures Jessamine blinking, sighing, crinkling her brow. _“I remember being so warm in your arms. So at ease. I remember thinking I had the strength to save this city, when you were at my side. Tell me, was I a fool?”_

He wants so desperately to respond, with anything at all, but his tongue is leaden. He isn’t looking at the Heart anymore, just staring into blankness somewhere above it instead. He wants to look at it. He doesn’t think he can.

_“I never thought there could come a time when I would not feel at peace in your presence.”_

He shakes his head, a slight movement, not meant for anyone. Not for himself, not for her— Though, this _isn’t_ her. _She_ wouldn’t say these things to him. The Heart lies.

He tells himself this, over and over.

_What is your plan, Corvo?_

_I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it. I just want my daughter._

_Is this all for her, then?_

The whole street seems like it’s flickering, like it’s not fully real, like it’s part of the Void. The sun has set, but it’s so bright the hour could be mistaken for daytime. Brighter. It hurts his eyes, but Corvo tries not to squint.

The Parliament building is ablaze.

_What is your plan?_

The fire rose quickly. A game of cat-and-mouse with the tallboys, hasty and reckless displays of marksmanship, and the Watch become the authors of their own city’s destruction. Stop time—and the incendiary arrows freeze with it, the seeds of flame at their tips just waiting to be carried into their new home. Nudge the projectiles through a broken window, plant one in this pile of papers, and the other in that one. Wait for the shoots of blaze to grow healthy and strong, help them along with a sprinkle of wind.

Black smoke billows out of the structure in globs the size of hot air balloons. It blankets the street, spreads to the nearby buildings, and then rises into the sky. Crackling sparks and debris shoot and flutter to the ground, and the bushes lose their artistic neat form to the mess of orange and red.

Could he set fire to Dunwall Tower? Smoke the Lord Regent out like a rat?

_Is this all for her?_

He can’t tell if the voice giving shape to the thought is his own, Jessamine’s, or the Outsider’s. Regardless, he thinks: yes. It is. No one else will hurt her. No one else will try to use her. They simply can’t, if there’s no one left to try.

He’s her Lord Protector—and he now has the power to keep her safe.

_And where is she? Where is your charge?_

_Corvo, who are you protecting?_

There is hardly a way to leave the city by common means at this point, and Corvo takes care of those nobles who haven’t taken the chance when they had it—until it goes wrong. Until in the fray of screaming maids and hollering guards down at street level, Corvo pulls his crossbow’s trigger the second he sees something move in his periphery, and the bolt pierces the throat of a young girl.

The Heart wails—or it might be himself, for all he knows. He’s at the girl’s side in an instant; he catches her as her legs refuse to bear her weight and tries to hold her up, but she goes limp and boneless in his arms like a soft-bodied doll. He lowers her to the floor, closes his hands around her neck and hovers them over the puncture point for lack of clear route of action, and she only spasms and gags on her own blood. There’s no open wound to press on to try and stop the blood flow, no gash to pour elixir on. He can only watch her suffocate.

She’s terrified. Confused. She looks nothing like Emily but must be somewhere around her age.

_Who are you protecting?_

Memories are a blur. He can’t instantly recall if he’s come across children in all the homes he’s scoured, and doesn’t remember what he did if he has. They must have been there all along. He must have made orphans out of so many of them. 

This is no place for children. Anger burns in his temples: at this girl’s parents—dead in the next room, he’s sure—for not taking their child to safety when they had the chance. At the house staff, for not protecting this girl properly. At the Outsider, for letting her into his path.

 _“It’s too late for her,”_ the Heart whispers—not in attempt of quietude, but, rather, for lack of strength to speak. It’s only then that Corvo registers the hot tears smudging his vision. _“Perhaps you’re similar in that way.”_

Corvo wants to scream, but all that comes out are breathless mutterings of nonsense, denial, and something vaguely resembling prayer. Wails and cries ring all around. Footsteps pound on the stairs several doors away, voices of the City Watch growing louder and more overwhelming.

The girl stops breathing, and Corvo shakes her by the shoulders as if that will wake her.

_“There is no saving this. Understand this one thing. There is no reverting the things you’re doing.”_

Doors fly open. Men burst in, barking orders, readying weapons.

 _“Don’t run.”_ Pleading, now. _“Hand yourself in. I trust that deep down you know to do the right thing.”_

Pistols go off. With a rolling growl Corvo throws out his arm, and the blast of wind slams the bullets right back into their senders. Some drop dead right then and there, some fall screaming. Reinforcements run in; the second blast crushes their bones against a wall.

Corvo flies past them, not bothering to finish off those still standing. Having reached the stairs, he vaults over the railing to drop down several flights, bolts out the nearest shattered window, and then he’s gone.

* * *

When Daud hurls Delilah into the Void, he hardly feels anything. Had the witch won, so what? The throne is lost, a rabid Marked is on the loose, the city is getting blockaded—what difference would a witch wearing the skin of a girl make? The coven may as well just burn it all to the ground.

The thought feels like peak of black comedy when a subtle scorched smell carries onto the _Undine_ reaching the Wrenhaven’s banks. Looking across the river to the Clocktower uncovers wispy plumes of smoke rising from a generous area beside it. In the city, announcements cycle through reports of deaths and injuries and people unaccounted for; reminders about the quarantine on Parliament Street and its outlying neighborhoods; and declarations of the indefinite ceasing of Gristolian Parliamentary activities.

No mention of evacuation. There is nowhere to evacuate anyone to.

The Flooded District is as good as deserted, even more so than usual, and it figures. Daud only claps Thomas on the shoulder—farewells won’t make up for all the unsaid, so they don’t bother—and heads into his office one last time, where Devon’s body still lies, half-devoured by rats.

In fact, there’s a whole nest of them in the corner. A can of chokedust takes care of that one, but the damage is done and first thing Daud does is rummage through his trunks for a mask, and then finds a satchel and makes a sweep through the entire base to gather up stashed coin and elixir and some of the remaining supplies.

It’s enough to disappear—or at least get a head start. He’ll make do. It’s enough to leave and never have to see this cursed city again and hope that the Outsider doesn’t follow. Finding a common smuggler to get past the quarantine line may be tricky, but maybe he can get ahold of Bluehand Jane and her export contacts, seeing as she begged him so zealously not to ship her to Utyrka in return for a favor. Or, who knows, maybe Lizzy might change her mind about staying. Maybe she’d decide to sail back to Morley or wherever else she might deem it fit for her crew, and agree to give him another ride.

He thinks about Emily, and the horrendous situation he’s put her in. The crushing, bitter futility of it all. But he promised to come back for her, assuming she hasn’t been found yet, and, reluctant, he goes to the Golden Cat.

She’s just a kid. She doesn’t deserve any of this. The notion is loud and clear when Emily, alive and well—as well as anyone in her position could be, anyway—greets him with feverish agitation and dubious relief.

“They— they said about a fire, and— and— and the killer, and— the Madame thinks they’ll close the place, she said there’s barely any customers, I’m sorry, I snuck out, I know you told me not to, I was scared—”

As she rambles, eager to spit up the emotions tearing at her without mercy, Daud remembers the apathy that he felt in Delilah’s plane of the Void, and it horrifies him. He pictures Emily’s dark eyes even darker, near black; cold and dull and full of the bitter hate of a witch.

Void, she’s just a fucking kid.

“Emily,” he says, and suddenly his voice threatens to fail him. He lowers into a crouch to ease the strain on his back after such a long night, then wets his lips and rubs his face.

He has no idea how he’s going to put this.

But Emily speaks before he can begin to choose words. “Where’s Corvo?” she asks, thin, frail. Afraid. “They— They said—” she bites at her lip and tries to square her jaw. “I don’t believe it. They’re wrong. I—”

“Emily.”

“Where is he?! You said you’d find him, so where is he?”

Was it not enough to bereave this child of a mother?

And yet—Daud may have given Corvo all the reason for revenge and then some, but what he did not do was tell him to bury the city while he’s at it. That’s on him.

The Outsider hasn’t mentioned Corvo recently, and otherwise his words were clipped and dry. Disappointed with his latest choice of Marked? Bored to death in this _predictable_ whirl of ash and ruin?

Serves him right.

“I, ah...” Daud closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. Trying on the different combinations of words in his mind does not provide him with a valid route of dancing around the issue. “The city isn’t safe. I’m going away. But I can’t leave you here alone.”

“I want to know where—”

“Emily.” He’s lied to children before, many a time, sometimes one simply must. He doesn’t recall it ever being this hard. “Corvo is gone.”

Breath halts between her parted lips. She stares, frozen, and Daud looks her in the eye. With all the pain he’s brought into her life, at least he’ll grant her this courtesy.

She shakes her head, and takes a step back.

He could spin all sorts of oxshit, under different circumstances. He could say that the plague took him. Or that the Watch caught him. Or that he fell in a heroic showdown with the conspirators of her mother’s murder—anything, really, to preserve at least some of his dignity in his daughter’s eyes. But Emily has heard things. She may be trying her best to shut it out, but she has heard of his _exploits,_ and, young as she is, she must intuitively understand the simple fact that he is out there, and not here with her.

“The fire,” Daud says on the exhale. Arson, the authorities say, and at this point there’s no real need to list off the suspects. He can only hope that Emily hasn’t yet connected those particular dots. “It spread quickly—”

“No.”

“I’m afraid he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

She backs away further, shaking her head, arms wrapped around herself. Her lip starts to tremble. “No. _No._ He can’t be.”

“It’s a terrible thing.”

_“Why?!”_

It’s better this way. Even if this is in no way his decision to make. Even if this isn’t his right. He won’t leave her to watch what her father turns himself into. He won’t leave her to die here. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. “I’m very, very sorry.”

The tears come next. Emily screams accusations, demands explanations, blames him for not getting to Corvo in time. She sobs and stomps her feet and batters him on the shoulders and kicks at his shins. Daud lets her.

When she runs out of fuel and shrinks into a sniffling ball of misery in the corner, and Daud makes sure she’s willing (or apathetic, or simply exhausted) enough to comply, he makes her put on his mask, and then they set off. 

* * *

Rain. Downpour, really, for several days straight. Rain floods the storm drains and the water rises from the clogged sewers, washing up drowned rats and flabs of rotting flesh and tissue. If the stench in the streets was bad already, now it’s hardly bearable at all.

It’s high up in the residential districts south of Kaldwin’s Bridge, one of the many quarantined zones where the City Watch no longer sets foot, that Corvo stays in an apartment and waits for the Wrenhaven to take him whenever it finally bursts its banks. 

He ought to move closer to ground level.

The neighborhoods in the area are riddled with shrines to the Outsider—disaster invites the devout, but the Strictures are not kind to victims of plague. The living have long abandoned their offerings, though weepers keep careful watch.

The shrines are useless either way. The runes are silent.

It’s at one of those shrines that Corvo left the Heart—also silent, ever since he fled the Estate District. He hasn’t tried to talk to it, just felt the weight of judgmental dismay hammered into him with every click of the gears. It felt natural to put it away, push it out of mind and free up space for his own thoughts.

The runes are cold in his hands. The Outsider doesn’t deign to honor them with his presence. Corvo, then, feels no shame for taking a knife to the bone and carving it into something else, in part to pass the time, in part in temperate curiosity despite not expecting anything of the result. He looks at the charms he’s found around the city and attempts to fashion something similar, but even a form as primitive as a cylinder is deceptively hard to make. The material runs short; Corvo quickly litters the surrounding space with throw-away scraps and chips of bone, and then ties a few crude stumps he’s made together with lengths of copper wire. The structures are feeble and sad.

He sleeps through the night—the rain doesn’t cede—and then goes to find more runes. 

There aren’t any more at the shrine at which he left the Heart, but he goes there first. Just to check, he figures, that weepers haven’t mangled it to mince.

Or maybe that the Outsider hasn’t taken it away.

But it’s there. The dim purple of the nearby lantern bathes it in a glow of unearthliness, makes it seem even more ghostlike than usual, and Corvo almost hesitates to touch it. When he does, the light in the little glass window blinks, as if the thing is flinching away. 

Corvo’s lips twitch. He doesn’t know why he came back here. Evidently, the Heart doesn’t either, and he has no idea how to even begin to react when it rustles, _“What would you have me say?”_

He feels like a boy, upsetting his mother for fighting the neighbors’ kid for the fourth or fifth time, when she no longer bothered to berate him. Those times were the worst, when he felt like scum for causing her yet more stress after father died and Beatrici ran off, and yet resented her in secret for growing withdrawn. She gave up, he used to think. She’s given up on me, like Beatrici’s given up on us.

_“What do you wish to hear? I cannot say anything you don’t already know yourself.”_

Corvo offers no response and lets the silence cut away at his ears, piece by piece. 

In looted stores and abandoned camps of the homeless, apart from scarce cans of food, he finds forgotten dusty bottles of cheap liquor. 

He brought the Heart back to the apartment. The rhythmic grind of its gears forms a sense of another presence to share in his self-isolation. It both irritates and lulls, and the swap between the two comes sudden and often. 

It’s a couple of days later, well into his third bottle of notoriously bad Gristolian vodka and feeling even worse than when he began, that anger takes hold.

He wants pity. He’s sunk low enough not to see why he shouldn’t admit it. He just wants some honest-to-Void pity—from the Outsider, who played with him for a time and cast him aside like a toy. From the Heart, a cruel caricature of the mind of the woman who loved him and always knew the right thing to say. From the whole fucking world, to acknowledge everything wrong with what was done to him, all the unfair and unforgivable things that broke him in every imaginable way.

“Why me?” he rasps through the sour burn in his throat. “Why— Why did it have to be you, why did you have to choose me, why did I—”

He regrets the words the moment they leave his lips. He doesn’t mean them, he wouldn’t trade the life he had with Jessamine for anything—but the pain of that loss is as great as that of the torture chair, if not more so. Because his body can be be scorched and torn and beaten a thousand times, but it wouldn’t compare to aches of no form. Flesh is tangible. Flesh can heal.

It must be the greatest punishment, the greatest ordeal he can think of, to be left alone in the world. To lose family. To lose those who gave him purpose.

And how many families did he break in turn? He thinks of the little girl with the pierced throat. How many ties has he torn? What has it brought him? Or has it ben chipping away at him instead, a craft so subtle he’s hardly noticed?

Too late now. He’s broken. He knows that much, and very well.

The Heart is ever silent. It’s vexing. It’s _insulting._ The delicate mechanisms click and grate; he can hear it almost as if the thing is right in his hold, and not tangled in a heap of his coat on the other side of the room.

The next series of drinks he takes comes surging over him in a wave of loathing and bitter grief.

“Say something,” he bites. He feels like he’ll go mad otherwise, disappear into his own head. “You’re supposed to speak, no? Then fucking speak.”

It doesn’t. It just ticks and ticks, slow, lethargic, even, and Corvo snickers. 

He knows what he did. He knows what he should be feeling. He doesn’t feel any of it; hardly even remembers his victims’ faces apart from the girl’s, and feels appropriately shattered but for all the wrong reasons. He isn’t prepared to unpack any of it.

Emily is still out there, he should resume his search for her. Where is she? He can’t begin to guess—and perhaps the plague already took her long ago. That wouldn’t be the worst, in truth. He can’t control the plague. Nobody can. Plague is aimless obscurity of no mind or purpose; it simply takes, indiscriminate. There is no one to blame when forces of nature are at work. He isn’t to blame. It’s easier that way.

But then he pictures her with peeling skin and bleeding eyes, reaching out towards him—to claw out his throat or perhaps for him to take her into his arms. His gut churns when he imagines the agonizing pain of disease, and what his little girl would have gone through had she died like this.

It’s a near physical reaction to these thoughts, a recoil. He doesn’t want this for her. Therefore, he decides, it isn’t true.

He’s gone too far, he’s done too much for it to end like this.

_“Bold sentiments. Audacious.”_

He flinches. His eyes shoot to the Heart and he waits, breath bated, for it to speak again with inflection so akin to the Outsider’s he almost mistook one for the other. The next time it does, however, the Heart is back to its familiar self. _“They are lies of your self-awareness, yet you invite them in. Why?”_

Corvo blinks, and frowns, and gives a slight shake of his head as if to suggest he doesn’t understand what she means.

_“You’ve done nothing to keep her safe, yet try to pretend otherwise while you sit in hiding, idling. Waiting for ruin. Breathing delusions and drinking poison.”_

Closing his eyes and clenching his jaw does nothing to redeem himself before the accusations. “Please. Just tell me.” The words grate against the lining of his throat. Saying them saps the energy from his limbs, as if he has begged her for the same a thousand times before. “If not where, at least tell me if she’s alive.”

 _“I have no way of knowing that.”_ What few fights they had behind closed doors over the years got nowhere near hysteric, yet somehow Corvo needs no effort to visualize Jessamine in such a state now. _“She is hidden from me. You yourself played a part in that, and you have the gall to think I owe you answers or validation. You want to hear you were justified in doing what you did. You weren’t. You know this.”_

“I was looking for her—”

 _“You weren’t.”_ Such a small claim, yet it’s like ice water surging over his head. _“You went astray. You chose a different road. You may try to lie to me, you may try to use your daughter as an excuse, you may even find her someday after all—but it will not change the fact that you gave her home a final nudge off the cliff. That you made a conscious choice to do so._

_“I hope you will change. I hope— I want to believe there is enough shame in you to someday let you look back on this time with wisdom and conscience. But this? There is no changing this. And you will live with it, forever burdened with the lives you took and played a hand in ruining, as I will always look upon this misery from the nest of your blood-soaked hands. I hope, for your sake, that you can never scrub them clean.”_

It’s only after a long stretch of ringing silence that Corvo registers the shaking in his hands. It’s especially evident with the visible quiver of the bottle whose neck he’s gripping to the point of pain.

He doesn’t know the proper thing to say, and regrets it at once when he forces out deliberate dismissal: “They’re just nobles.”

 _“As was the empress. Was the assassin Daud justified in what he did?”_ Corvo’s muscles clench, strain, as if to hold himself back from jumping out of his own skin. _“You once asked if you were the one who killed her. Would you have? Would you have killed the princess, as well?”_

“Stop,” he croaks. “That’s not how this works.”

 _“It is exactly how this works, because you made it so. This is the game you’ve made, and these are its rules.”_ Corvo rises on shaky legs, holding on to the wall in search of balance as he glares at the organ across the room. _“No fairness, no trials, equal judgment for all—with repercussions stretching far wider than you yet have the range to see.”_

“You could have helped.” He takes a rocky step, and then another. “You could have stopped all this, if you cared to point me the way.”

_“I am not meant to be your polestar.”_

“Then what’s your purpose?” he spits. “What use is your counsel? Whatever the point the Outsider was trying to make, all this brought me is pain.”

_“That makes two of us.”_

He’s at her side of the room in an instant and thinks it a wonder he hasn’t stumbled. He steadies himself with a hand at the wall once more; then drops to his knees, sets the bottle aside, and wraps his hands around the Heart’s thumping form. It shrivels in his hold, even though he’s hardly squeezing.

In fact, he’s holding it far gentler than he thinks it deserves.

 _“You have doomed us.”_ It’s a statement of unthinkable force, of such strong conviction and acrid accusation, but the voice that says it is so frail and sunk that Corvo finds himself unable to process the meaning. _“But perhaps this is what the empress deserved—for not doing enough. For not being mindful enough. For letting this nation come so unforgivably close to a breaking point…”_

“You were trying,” Corvo rasps, and hardly hears himself at all.

_“…that it is only fitting to be forced to watch it tipping over.”_

“It’s a vipers’ pit.” The need to say this, the fact that it’s apparently necessary, is painful. “Always has been. You were too good for this place, too…” innocent, weak, alone, “…powerless to change a deeply rotten system built on graves and pillars of deceit and greed over _centuries—”_

_“I should have done more.”_

“You did all you could.”

_“And you tore down what little there was.”_

Corvo barely registers the hiss tearing out of his chest. It’s a cry, more like—a violent clawing at his insides from the failures of his becoming, from the grief and disappointment of the one who found him when he was lost and abandoned by all.

“I never cared about any of it.” It’s shameful admission and cathartic release in one. Dunwall was never his home; though he never bothered to try and make it one, always thinking he was justified in being uninterested in anything that wasn’t his lover or child. “I never felt that I needed to.”

 _“And for this,”_ the Heart whispers, _“I weep.”_

And Corvo weeps, clutching and clawing at the Heart in his lap as he bends himself in two. His pulse hammers in his temples and neck; headache threatens to split his skull apart and he wants to hurry it along and crack it open himself on the splintering floorboards.

 _“I weep for you.”_ The _anguish._ He has never heard anything this bleak. _“For the man you were. For the man you are, who I love, even still. For whom I fell all those years ago. And I still see him, that boy who just wanted to find his place in the world—who’s still there, yet so firmly turning away._

_“I do not know where our daughter is. I do not know where she is hidden. I hope like nothing else that she still lives, that she is healthy and safe... But, by the stars, I hope that you never find her.”_

And the world comes to a still.

“You don’t mean that.”

 _“I fear for what you may teach her.”_ The words are soaked in hurt, stitched through with it like embroidery, but Corvo hardly hears over the white noise in his head. _“I fear for—”_

“No. You can’t. No.”

_“—the pain that tears at you to consume her as well. What it may do to her. I wonder—”_

“Stop it.”

_“—if she is better off without you.”_

“Stop. Shut up.” He might be screaming. He might be rasping for his failing vocal cords. He can’t tell. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

Though despite the torturous quiet of prior, something tells him she will never be quiet again.

 _“You can’t silence me.”_ He’s shaking his head and squeezing the rubbery muscle as if to crush it. He wonders if it hurts her, if the flesh digging into the little window’s frame brings her genuine pain. _“Because you know it’s true. Because there is nothing I could say that you wouldn’t tell yourself.”_

She can’t. She can’t _do_ that.

Warnings bellow and blare in his head even before he thinks to reach for his coat nearby. They switch to cries and pleadings when he starts to blindly paw at the fabric, throwing back the heavy folds and bypassing any attempts to make sense of the tangled mess. He’s not quite sure what he’s trying to do, but he ignores all the voices telling him not to as he clamps the Heart to the floor with his other hand, pinning it in place as if it could scurry away. 

He finds the lighter in the breast pocket. The cold metal of its casing is sobering.

_“Corvo.”_

Never once has the Heart called him by name. The sound of it stabs at him like an ice spike and he freezes— _she can’t do that_ —then jerks his head to clear it of hesitation and doubts and false, mistaken wants. This isn’t her. It never was. He hates it for all the moments it made him think otherwise.

And it’s enough. No more of that.

“You wanted death.” It’s not his voice, he doesn’t recognize it. It’s stiff and cold and numb. “Didn’t you say so?”

Deprived of death’s gift, held neither in this world nor the Void. What empty existence it must be.

He sucks on his teeth, blows out an exhale, and then drops the lighter on top of his coat. Instead, he reaches for the bottle beside him. “So let me fix that for you.”

 _“This will not help you.”_ The vodka splashes onto his hand, stinging the cuts left by careless knife work, when he tips the bottle over to drench the Heart in the liquor. _“You don’t know what you’re doing. You will break, left alone with your thoughts, it will bring you to ruin—”_

It says something else, increasingly quicker, louder, more frantic, but Corvo no longer cares to listen. It’s _enough._ He takes one last swig before pouring the rest on the Heart, emptying the bottle to the last drop.

There’s not enough time for the voices in his head to convince him to stop as the flame of his lighter heats the alcohol’s vapors and soon leaps onto the flesh itself. And at that point, it’s done. It’s out of his hands. Corvo shoves the Heart away, letting go before it can burn him. 

The fire is slow to envelop the surface, yet at the same time it feels like it takes but a fraction of a second. Warnings and pleadings screech in his head: grab the coat, throw it on top, cut the flow of air—but he can’t move. He _refuses_ to move. He forces himself to sit still and stare into the growing flame, but if he closes his eyes he can almost hear the Heart screaming his name. Can it feel the pain, he wonders. Does it feel itself dying, or else slipping away?

He doesn’t listen longer than he has to. He opens his eyes back up and watches the flesh burn, all the way, until there’s nothing left except scraps of charred metal.

At last, the voices cease, and in their place sparks a renewed vigor with which Corvo takes to the grounds of the lowest social strata—because Emily is resourceful. Because she’s a clever, courageous girl who could never sit still and has never been an epitome of complaisance despite all the efforts of her tutors. On the off chance that she managed to slip away from her captors and find shelter, Corvo rakes through the neighborhoods that still function on their last breath, not blocked off by any direct means simply because the guard force stopped bothering after a certain point.

Bodies—some wrapped in linen, some open to the air—litter the alleyways in piles for lack of room in dumpsters or at the walls. The living—the sick, mostly, for whom there is no room indoors—share the same spaces, huddling under makeshift canopies and tents to catch at least some protection from the elements.

Determination and focus replace the shivering panic that Corvo shoves far behind his breastbone as he slips through these alleyways. There are no weepers in the vicinity, at least: as Corvo understands it, they try to put down those in the most hopeless condition before the illness gets that far. He weaves in and out of contaminated orphanages, overcrowded apartment buildings repurposed as shelters for the homeless and the sick, soup kitchens a hair’s breadth away from shutting down entirely due to looting and strain and lack of resources. He asks the service workers and scours the announcement stands (where information on missing persons no longer gets updated, in truth); peers into the survivors’ faces and sizes up any small form, be it child or shriveled plague victim. It’s sometimes difficult to tell at first glance. 

Some recognize him as he passes them by: from the papers and posters, no doubt. It is strictly for this reason that Corvo seeks out a City Watch outpost and gets his hands on a face mask before continuing with his search. Too late, as it turns out the next day when he breaks twice into a coughing fit, and when he vomits at a street corner the day after that.

The woman is on her deathbed, surely she knows it even if the caretakers mislead her with promise of a fighting chance. There’s a cup with a couple fingers’ worth of watered-down elixir on a stand by her bedside; with the strength of a child, she grips Corvo by the wrist when he plucks it up.

Her sunken, bloodshot eyes scream misery and hatred when he quietly tells her that he’s sorry. Truly. But he needs this more. At this stage, it won’t help her. Nothing will. But he could put her out of her misery, if she’d like. Send her off painlessly. 

She coughs up phlegm and hisses out wheezing expletives, and he leaves her to suffer as she wishes.

Day after day Dunwall’s chances grow slimmer. Day after day, despite logic and reason, Corvo convinces himself a little bit more that Emily somehow escaped the plague’s clutches. Barring the Tower District (there’s no way of getting close to the Tower, therefore, he chooses to believe that she cannot be there) he combs through the sectors not yet riddled by weepers to no avail. But—though half-dead, the city does not sleep. It’s a round-the-clock race against roving swarms of rats and ever-growing manmade barricades, a race that herds him to the outskirts over the course of just a few weeks, and then further yet. Like he’s not welcome. Like he’s intruding on a delicate process. It’s almost as if the Doom of Pandyssia itself speaks to him through the minds of the rats whose bodies he takes as second skin: _There is nothing left for you here. Leave._

So he does. It must be a rush of moronic optimism, or else plain stubbornness alike that of a cornered animal, that allows him the audacity to believe that Emily may no longer be in the city at all.

With this feverish hope, he slips past the quarantine line and leaves Dunwall behind.

**Author's Note:**

> .......Well then!  
> Atrociously long first chapter right there. But I wanted to get the setup out the way in one fell swoop, it’s important but the story that I have in mind isn’t about the first game. As this gets heavily canon divergent and I don’t have anything else to post yet, I should probably say that right after this comes a jump of a few years into the future, so it's fair to think of this chapter as just a huge chunk of context.
> 
> But anyway, yeah, this is a bit of an experiment where I put a different spin on the characters from what I’m used to writing and shove them into a different premise and see how their interaction changes accordingly. I haven’t seen - or actively sought out, rather - many works with high-to-low chaos Corvo so for me personally this is just new and fresh and exciting. Huge shoutout to lostsoul512 for birthing a lot of these ideas in the first place! <3 
> 
> This will be pretty slow to update but please don’t take that as discontinuation, I’d work on this regularly if only I had the time 😔 Also, the title is from the song of the same name by Queens of the Stone Age.


End file.
